When it comes to Microsoft's browser, many friends think of Internet Explorer for the first time. Because Microsoft pre-installed Internet Explorer in Windows by default, this browser once became the browser with the highest market share. Even when Microsoft copied the graphical interface of Apple's Mac OS, as a condition of the settlement, Apple asked Microsoft to develop the Office suite and IE browser for Mac OS, and IE once became the default browser of Mac.
However, since the second decade of the 21st century, IE browser was slow to follow up with the new Internet standards and attempted to influence the development of W3C standards by virtue of its huge market share. It was eventually defeated by rising stars and compatible with outdated ones. Internet Explorer has also become a nightmare for every front-end engineer. In order not to be abandoned by the market, Microsoft broke its arm, abandoned IE, re-developed the kernel, and focused on their new browser: Edge.
Initially, Edge is a browser optimized for touch scenes on Win10. The design of the icon and the handwriting note function integrated with OneNote reflect that this browser is designed for tablet mode. Later, as IE was gradually abandoned by the mainstream market, Edge became Microsoft’s last life-saving straw. Microsoft righted Edge and made it its main browser product, and began to recommend users to set Edge as the default browser in Windows systems. Not IE.
But because the experience of the early version of Edge is very bad, and the extremely flat UI design specifically designed for touch scenes does not meet the public taste. Even after many iterations, Windows users still have no good feelings about this "slapped IE". The market position of the Edge browser has been very awkward, and Google's Chrome has grown into the world's most user-friendly browser in just ten years.
Finally, Microsoft made a bold decision in March of this year: abandon its own kernel and use Google's open source Chromium kernel instead. In other words, in Edge now, the HTML parser, CSS renderer, and JavaScript engine are all of the same root as the Chrome browser. Simply put, Edge is more like a Chrome with a different skin. After switching to the Chromium kernel, even the icons became somewhat similar to Chrome.
In fact, the use of Chromium kernel is nothing new. Domestic browsers such as 360, Tencent, Cheetah, etc. all use Chromium kernel. At present, there are only two mainstream browser kernels on the market, Chromium and Gecko. Microsoft's replacement of Edge with Chromium kernel is also a choice to comply with the market.
The Edge browser now has the same smooth experience as Chrome, even faster under the tuning of Microsoft, and at the same time has a good cloud backup experience (for some reasons, Google’s cloud service is not available in China), plus Bundled with Windows, it is not surprising that Edge has achieved a 10% market share. But there is still a long way to go to catch up with Chrome's nearly 70% market share, and it is too early to say that Microsoft's browser is ready to return to its peak.
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